Page tags
Watchers
Title your submissions Day # : Discussion of Chapter
This will make daily notes for each chapter an easy find.
Then provide a full, thorough summary of that day's conversation.
No comments to submissions in this section, please — it is meant to serve as a running summary of class discussion. A repository, if you will — not quite a forum (the other page will fulfill that purpose).
-Malik
• Chapter One of Malcolm X:
o Introduction into Malcolm X’s World: Nightmare:
• Pay attention to the language in chapter one, and how it situates us. Language, by itself, reveals a speaker and his /her world.
• There is a confession in the style of the language—Confessional Narrative Mode:
• Situates the reader in the past and the present—moment being narrated, and the moment of the narrator.
o We can see the confessional voice in the present talking about the confessional voice in the past.
o Present moment: Malcolm X
o Past moment: Malcolm Little
• The text is about reinventions. Identify the differences between Malcolm X and Malcolm Little.
o Foreshadows/ Prefigures of the text—themes that define his life:
• The world of Malcolm X is defined by violence.
• Violence is present in his life.
• Predicts he will die by violence
• “It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence” (4).
• Color consciousness—intra-racial culture.
o Labels—fair skinned, “light complexioned” (5).
o The identities feel difference—partial white descent.
• “Darkie”, “Rastus”, “nigger”, “negroes”
• Differentiation between brothers and sisters (11)—“early in life, I had learned that if I wanted something, you had to make some noise” (11).
o Value of agitation.
o Value of resilience.
• Value of intellectualism—the power of the intellectual life deems a feeling of superiority over others. “…my mother had a pretty good education…” (6), and “… in these meetings both they and my father were more intense, more intelligent and down to earth…” (11).
o Self- reliance/ distrust of institutions—institutions ruined my family.
• Institutions that ruined his family: Insurance company, welfare, hospitals, churches, credit, policemen, and firemen.
• Enjoys pointing out teachable moments.
o See p. 20, and 25.
• “Its like the Negro in America…” (20).
• “All I had done…” (25).
• Criminality—goes to prison—knows how to steal, kids rip him off etc…
• Casual about racism—see p. 7.
o Envy and jealousy of whiteness, as well as elousy of whiteness.
Chapter 2 "Mascot":
Big Points that we discussed during class about chapter 2:
-Title of the chapter: Mascot
-Casual demeaning/ dehumanization
-race and expectations, shows positions and roles in life, where you fit in, in life
-Interracial Interactions: part of being a mascot
1) sports competition (the Louis Braddock fight- boxing, 1937, was the second black heavy weight camp, Jack Johnson was the first)
2) entertainment
3) romantic/sexual relationships, (pg. 36)
-Ella, Malcolm's older sister: black pride (pg.39)
-Malcolm uses black instead of Negro
-Malcolm rejects the label during his discussion with Mr. O and changes his life and the way he looked at white people
-Shift to general/ collective indictment/ critique (American white man)
- Can we ID Malcolm's issues with black Christian practices/ policies?
-Malcolm is culturally woven into the Mascot label
Process of assimilation with White Culture
- Chapter 3 is one of the most excerpted chapters dubbed "My First Conk"
- a power dynamic favoring white beauty standards + culture
- ID's intraracial class division, indicts "snooty" blacks for class discrimination/exclusion
- character intro: Shorty, Malcolm's "homeboy" (value: relationship forges friendship, ex-pat status/ Definition: a fellow former resident of someone's hometown simultaneously living in the same place)
- slang => a substitution of words that signifies terms but lessen the value or sting of the original word
(eg. Slave = job)
Malcolm's intro to vice starts with association in new community
the conk
- Malcolm makes it seem as a important moment in his life due to detail
- many references to pain in process of obtaining the conk
- Narration vs. reflection at the end of process
- signifies the desire of blacks wanting to be white or achieve beauty as defined by whites (white beauty hegemony)
- black pain of beauty inferiority/pain of "beautifying process"
- loss/erasure of black identity
October 2
Chapter 4 and 5
“Laura”
Malcolm’s “secret humiliation [he] couldn’t dance”(66)
monolithic identity
was not natural to him, felt pressured he should be able to dance since he was black.
Difference with Conk?
Double consciousness
class divide
“Im going to call her Sophia”(78)
Interracial taboo working in opposite direction: white woman as a supreme object of desire. (During this time, black men were being lynched regularly, especially for doing anything to a white woman).
“Harlemite”-a transitional chapter
GEOGRAPHY
Making the move from Boston to Harlem,NYC(Black Mecca)
“Even as far back as Lansing, I had been hearing about how fabulous New York was, and especially Harlem…”(82)
Pullman Porters-(first major train company to allow blacks to work on their trains).
Representative of blue collar black middle class.
Double standard(twice as good for some work)
Another root of animosity:military service
Fighting for a country that did not accept them.
Segregation:
“White New York passed by like a movie set, then abruptly, when we left Central Park at the upper end, at 110th street, the people’s complexion began to change”(84).
Onomastic Shift:Malcolm little- Detroit Red.
White gaze persist in Harlem clubs
Perspective/Worldview/Perspective shift: greater/ wider expense of black culture
Personality shift: arrogant, obscene, manipulative
Status Indicators
Moving to Harlem
Conk
White Woman
Zoot suit
The chapter "Detroit Red" emphasizes the life of crime on multiple fronts, addressing multiple angles of the crime world. Malcolm X first introduces crime when describing the Numbers Game, an illegal activity involving gambling and lottery. He first details the people involved in the Numbers Game operation. The people of the Numbers Business includes runners, controllers, bankers, and the gamblers themselves. Malcolm X describes the runners as the messengers and gatherers, the controllers as the systems' organizers, the bankers as the people in charge of securing the money from the police, and the gamblers as customers. The process of Numbers involves a Winning Number, the last three digits of the daily stocks. This notion of taking extracting the Winning Number from the daily stocks makes the game somewhat determined and definite, differing from today's completely random gambling system. Malcolm presents a situation where illegal gambling is based on legal gambling of stocks, demonstrating an illegal world fundamentally constructed by a legal world with the same practices. Establishing a connection between these two worlds shows how the skills and habits of the mind in the legal and illegal world are similar. Malcolm X portrays to the reader that the people, mainly African Americans, who could be successful at legal enterprise end up being controllers and bankers of illegal enterprise, where their strategic skills are fixed into an underground venue.
Malcolm X also presents different perspectives on the topic of pimps and prostitutes. Detroit Red views pimps as masters of manipulation and students of psychology. He also introduces his relationship and understanding of women, accusing mainly white women to be pliable and submissive to the paternalistic gender norm. However, he displays prostitutes as an exception to his standard view of women. Their skills of perception and manipulation, demonstration of independence and power, and their lack of hypocrisy common among white-wives crossing the racial divide generates Malcolm X's, as well as Detroit Red's, respect. Malcolm X indicates the presence of a hierarchy of manipulation within the prostitution world, placing pimps at the top of the pyramid, followed by prostitutes, and finally the white men at the bottom.
Key ideas, themes, and moments throughout chapters:
Romanticizing settings
The intent of X's autobiography is to immerse the reader into his world. He is appealing to an audience not of scholars or analysts, but of common people who he wants to communicate his life story. As a result, Malcolm X romanticizes his story; the setting and the people. Malcolm X casts his experience as exciting and glamorous, idealizing the role of being the "reefer man" to famous musicians. He designs his narrative to grab the reader, enhancing and highlighting the criminal life.
More vice: stick-up boy, descent into addiction
The Autobiography of Malcolm X fits into numerous textual genres, and one of them is a story of addiction. X describes his routine of “staying high on narcotics [to keep] me from getting nervous (126). This shows the transition of Malcolm’s character; the descent into a reliance on drugs and entry into the world of “hustling,” which leads inevitably to “more and more, worse and worse, illegality and immorality” (126).
"Conditioning"
‘Conditioning’ is a term Malcolm uses to describe how and why Harlemites react to dealing with and buying stolen merchandise. Because of experience, they subconsciously have an expectation and sense of normalcy, ‘norms and normative’ for the procedure of buying high-quality stolen goods. (Reginald takes advantage of these people’s conditioning by pretending his goods are stolen when they are perfectly legitimate and he has a license to sell them.
Commodity Riots in Harlem-1935, 1943
The commodity riots in Harlem were the first of its kind, and they became a template almost all American riots after its time. They started in an ethnic neighborhood, (African-American in Harlem), when white people in a position of power made racial affront. As a response, residents of the neighborhood attacked property in that neighborhood that was not owned by people who lived there. For example, businesses and stores were looted during the Harlem riots.
Integration
Page 132 marks the first explicit statement that integration is hypocrisy. Malcolm’s tone and language express the contempt he has for such an idea.
West Indian Archie
West Indian Archie has a photographic memory, and is the strongman of Dutch Shultz, a famous white mobster. Malcolm uses this character to prove many points. 1) Somewhere up the chain of command, all black people respond to some white position of power. 2) Black people with exceptional skills, like the photographic memory and intelligence, could be successful businessmen if they had the access, and lived in a different society.
Also, the name of the chapter, "Trapped," refers to both Malcolm and West Indian Archie. West Indian Archie is trapped by the pressure to preserve his reputation as an experienced gangster, and Malcolm is trapped because of the accusation of trying to cheat him. To protect their reputation, both have no choice but to try to kill each other (until Malcolm ends up fleeing Harlem, in a form of exile. Their reputation is their currency, and it proves to be fickle and easily compromised.
"Rudy"
Rudy is the only character in the book that cannot be verified as a real person, and scholars have theorized that Rudy is actually Malcolm. So the experience with the old man was Malcolm, prostituting himself.
The Roulette game
Malcolm plays Russian roulette in front of Shorty and Rudy, his partners in crime, to prove that he is “not afraid to die” (165). This action, basically a 1/5 chance gamble with instant death, shows Malcolm's disregard for life and how far removed he is from a certain consciousness.
Legal double standards
The punishments for Malcolm and his partners show the real injustices in the legal system because of the power dynamic. Though the same crime was committed, the punishments are very different; bail for Malcolm is $10,000 but the girls are let off easily. The social workers and judge are more concerned with the interaction of the black men and the "well-to-do upper-middle class whites" (173).
The chapter closes with a reflection from Malcolm, a justification for why he includes all these events from his adolescent and young-adult years. He describes how the events shape the person he is and prepares the reader for the transition into prison life.
- temporality/editor-as-writer
- transition from a non religious text:
Through this chapter, readers are taken through Malcolm's transition from a completely non religious perspective to his harsh critique of the Nation of Islam, to his newfound faith in the ideals of Orthodox Islam.
- Malcolm's religious transition is relatable to that of St. augustine's confessions in the sense that in both books they put major focus on vice and crime before the discovery of religion, as a way to stress the positive impacts religion can have on a person's life.
demonology: how is evil located and identified in society?
- Reginald reveals concept of "white devils"
- explanation of white people's destruction of natural black culture, making them seem incompetent in the eyes of the white societal expectation
- explanation of black people's natural state (before white people's effects on their culture) in which
they are as intelligent, competent, sophisticated, and deserving of respect as everybody else.
Malcolm's double conversion: both intellectual and spiritual
- irony of his intellectual expansion in a place where he is physically confined (prison)
- After learning about concept of white devils, Malcolm goes through a montage of all the ways throughout his life in which white people had been evil, and becomes an instant believer in the concept.
To begin class we discussed the end of Malcom's life as Detroit Red. Perhaps the defining moment of this transformation is Malcom's engagement wit books. Malcom mentions that he had forgotten how to read and his moment of dictionary learning. This learning serves as a rope moment, seeing as it is a common theme in many African-American slave narratives. Like Frederick Douglas and many other slaves, Malcom's worldly perspective is expanded after becoming a literate autodidact (self-teaching) and this expansion serves as empowerment. Additionally it was noted how chapter 11 mirrors chapter 10, and presents a montage of world/historical racialized atrocities committed by whites instead of the personal atrocities Malcom X experiences in his personal life. Going off the African-American literary tradition and race, the power of white validation was also recorded. Malcom explains how many of his fellow black prison mates need white confirmation through authorship to believe Malcom's claims of Black greatness.
The comparison of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington was also very interesting. We concluded that Malcom X would have disagreed with both author's theory of integration (during the period of his life as a member of the Nation of Islam) and would have agreed with DuBois model of education as empowerment, but would have denounced DuBois' theory of the talented tenth (Malcom constantly notes the intraracial class divide within the African-American community many times throughout his Autobiography). Booker T. Washington's notions of self sufficiency and collectivism may have appealed to Malcom, but Washington's lack "willpower" may have bothered the agitated Malcom. Also worth mentioning was Malcom's attempt to conflate the black struggle in America during the 60's with international oppression of people of color. He does this through requesting "human" rather than "civil" rights. These ideas would prove inspirational for the students protests of the 60's and the Black panther party.
Dr. Manning Marable on Malcolm X and Harlem:
Harlem became the symbol of black urbanism (1920s, 30s and 40s). Harlem was the largest urban center off black life in America. by 1960, over 700,000 African Americans lived in Harlem. It was the center of black culture, imagination, and spirit. Many famous people lived there, including WEB Dubois. Malcolm identified all of this in Harlem and was attracted to it. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. had a great influence on Malcolm X. Powell organized protest called “Don’t buy where you cant work”. Malcolm did not participate but was influenced by this. He eventually used same tactics a decade later.
Police Brutality:
In 1957, 3 members of N.O.I. were beaten by police and taken to the 28 Pct. of New York police department. 4-5 thousand came to protest to demand their release. This protest made Malcolm hugely popular. This episode is played down by Malcolm in comparison to other’s accounts (268). Malcolm was able to disperse thousands of Black people with a hand motion (no words or announcement). A police officer said afterwards that “No one man should have all that power” – influenced Kanye West.
3 Symbols:
(221) X buys eyeglasses, suitcase, and wrist watch – uses all three things in his life. Eyeglasses are purchased because he has read so much in prison and now appears educated and smarter.
Wristwatch symbolizes his value on time (drives with watch, not speedometer). Malcolm X talks about Detroit Red’s life of timelessness under the influence of drugs. The watch is a correction of life and brings order to his life
The Suitcase symbolizes professionalism. Malcolm moves around a great amount, as he moved as a child but a correction of past moving. The suitcase represents a connection of all of the temples, preaches in many different temples, and individuals’ houses. Malcolm doesn’t have a steady home, but instead he moves around constantly (transient). Can be described as an Itinerant (used to describe salesmen, messengers, and preachers (those who spread things)). This is a connection to the nature of his family (starting with his father). The suitcase replaces his gun, he is always prepared, this time transitioned from violence.
All 3 objects are both symbolic and practical – all three are corrections of his prior life. The eyeglasses correct his intellectualism, the wristwatch corrects his timelessness, and his suitcase corrects his methods of preparedness
“We didn’t land on Plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us,” (Chapter 12, 232)
The Prayer:
(246) Construction of the faith: the phrases “in which we now live”, “after they have heard they teaching” and “and The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is Thy Servant and Apostle” are additions from an Orthodox Sunni prayer to the N.O.I. prayer.
The phrase “In which we now live” tailors to American society and modern times. It implies that this is the day of judgment (adds urgency, apocalyptic tone). The Apocalypse is the same day in Christianity and Judaism. There is design in the moment of the prayer. N.O.I. mindfully implements the Bible and Koran into its religion. The clause "Guide us on the right path, the path of those upon whom Thou has bestowed favors - not of those upon whom Thy wrath is brought down, nor the path of those who go astray after they have heard Thy teaching" says that once you have been taught, you are entered into Islam and cannot back away from it.
Malcolm's View on Women:
Malcolm speaks of women in a degrading and condescending tone (247). (260) He calls women "deceitful, tricky, untrustworthy flesh.”
How is Malcolm attracted to Betty?
Based on physical attraction (Western lust, not attraction to character and personality). He justifies his love of her (267): “Islam is the only religion that gives both husband and wife a true understanding of what love is.” (263) Decides Betty is of the right height and age, so she would fit, not because he wants her for who she is (suitable, but no emotional connection). Malcolm opposes the Hollywood understanding of love (he calls it lust). Instead, he finds a wife based on suitability.
Marcus Garvey reappears as an influence in these chapters (segregation vs. integration)
Muslims give more respect to women than most black men do. (263) Malcolm wanted to understand how she thinks. He recognizes her devotion to the N.O.I., as she feels pressure from her parents to leave the N.O.I. but she remains faithful. Their relationship is heavily influenced by his religion. Malcolm recognizes that Betty X is loyal, and a strong person. Still, it can be argued that he marries her for his religion, not for his personal desire. We discussed how no one trusts a man who runs for president who’s not married, and how Malcolm needs to be married for his public image. By Malcolm’s standards, Betty is the best woman possible for his situation.
“The Hate That Hate Produced” (273):
This TV show is the first appearance on a large spectrum of the Nation of Islam. Black people that are leaders are generally endorsed by white people, so they seek white people's approval. Malcolm recognizes that white people still control the world (he considers himself a field negro, not a house negro). Malcolm also gains an influential media presence.
